Serverless Craic Ep25 Intro to the Value Flywheel Effect

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

Our book 'The Value Flywheel Effect' is being published by IT Revolution Press on 29 November. We thought it might be worth having a chat about what the the value flywheel is. It is something we have painfully discovered over many years of working. Things really start to work well, when you join the business and technology strategy. We came up with this model to describe how you do that in a company.

There are four phases. Phase one is 'clarity of purpose'. Phase two is 'challenge'. Phase three is 'next best action'. And phase four is 'long term value'. So we will deep dive into each of these in our next set of episodes. But for now, we will quickly go through them.

Clarity of Purpose

So the first phase is 'clarity of purpose'. Clarity of purpose is a very difficult thing to to establish. Business and IT need to look at 'what is our mission'? What is it? How can we add value? What is it we want to do? Does everybody understand it? Has everyone bought into it? In your organisation, how do you prioritise, how do you make a decision on what you should do over something else? How do we establish that clarity of purpose? It's about getting alignment as well. And trying to clarify what your clarity of purpose is. Or what your North star is. And what your key input metrics are. They are valuable conversations to have. They spark off good thoughts and conversations with people on teams. And it doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to start getting alignment and people pointing in the right direction together. It's not what your boss says!, Your boss should explain what the clarity purpose is, but they may not. So don't blindly follow what your boss says. And then the second thing that it is interesting for an engineer or developer, is that your purpose is not to write code! You don't come to work to write code. You come to work to achieve clarity of purpose for the team and the company.

Challenge

The second phase, challenge, sits well with that. These first two are very much linked to the business strategy. And challenge is not to argue with the clarity of purpose. Once you're clear on the clarity of purpose, it's then what do we do to achieve that? That's when you need a healthy environment. Where there's challenge. Not have a fight with someone. It's a form of verification. We've decided the priorities and these are things that we're talking around. But what's the what's the best way to go about it? Let's have a conversation around that. Look at the landscape and evaluate our position. Are we being realistic? Good conversation and rationale go into this phase. Do we have an environment that invites challenge? You need to make sure that socio technical systems are set up. And challenge is invited and not punished. Are people getting a chance to challenge? Are we bringing in the experts? Who should we be talking to? Where's their voices? That's where Wardley Mapping is a powerful technique, because you're challenging the idea and not the person. You're not challenging the individual telling the story, you're challenging the approach. It's healthy and it promotes psychological safety.

Next Best Action

The third phase is next best action. And this is having a bias for action. What can you do quickly, to prove your direction. This is where serverless comes in. It's the rate of turm. How quickly can you make change? And how quickly can you get change into the hands of real users and customers? Or how quickly can you have an impact? Sometimes you have good priorities, you've challenged and you know what you want to do. But then it can get locked up in technical bureaucracy. It's removing those impediments to fast flow. Can we quickly get an idea into the hands of real users to get valid feedback. It's a very important phase for the organisation to embrace. We got into it in the book, which is great. If you've got an urgent business problem, you don't want to be off doing low level stuff. You're never going to get to it. So how can you make progress? Well not quickly!

Long Term Value

The fourth phase is long term value. It's about bringing in architectural and sustainability standards. How can you go fast without burdening yourself with lots of technical debt? And how can you go fast and at a sustainable pace? Or how can you deliver a well architected solution? With capabilities that enable the flywheel to turn faster. And it doesn't clog everything up and slow you down. Once you get to that, you're back into clarity of purpose again. And it keeps going. What we've found by going through these phases, is that each time you get better at them. You keep revisiting and you keep improving. As you turn the flywheel, you create more space for innovation and emerging value. You will start to spot where you should invest next. It becomes becomes a good muscle that you can exercise.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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